Bug#1033897: Firefox and thunderbird fail to launch under, sysvinit

[Jesse Smith]

> Hello dear Maintainers.
> 
> I encountered a strange bug with the GNOME Shell. 
> To reproduce:
> 
> 1) Set up a debian/devuan testing/sid vm with sysvinit.
> 2) Install gnome-core
> 3) Try to launch firefox(-esr) or thunderbird from a GNOME wayland session
> 
> Nothing happens. The process opens and terminates instantly. Neither KDE Plasma (wayland) exhibits this bug, nor GNOME on xorg, nor a wayfire session launched 
> via dbus.
> Strangely firefox launches fine when MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 is set. ktrip and kgeotag also fail to launch when forced on x11 with QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb.
> My guess: Some weird xwayland quirk ? Xwayland is running. 
> 
> Happy to provide more debugging. For now, it can be worked around by explicitly setting said env vars to force wayland
> I haven't tested another init system. Sending this from my systemd machine in case you're wondering.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Matthias Geiger



Hi Matthias,

What is the output in your terminal if you try to launch Firefox or
Thunderbird from a virtual terminal? Does it say anything about the
display or a missing library?

You said this works under Plasma and under GNOME's X11 session, so I'm
guessing this is mostly related to GNOME's Wayland implementation (and
related variables) rather than init itself. But let's try to rule out
all the possibilities by looking at the command line output when the
program launches and crashes.

Jesse